The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  “And one who detests popular music had to find it! I fear, Mr. Spotswoode, that an unkind fate sat in at your game.”

  “Yes.… If I were religiously inclined, I might talk poppycock about retribution and divine punishment.”

  “I’d like to ask you about the jewelry,” said Markham. “It’s not sportsmanlike to do it, and I wouldn’t suggest it, except that you’ve already confessed voluntarily to the main points at issue.”

  “I shall take no offense at any question you desire to ask, sir,” Spotswoode answered. “After I had recovered my letters from the document box, I turned the rooms upside down to give the impression of a burglary—being careful to use gloves, of course. And I took the woman’s jewelry for the same reason. Parenthetically, I had paid for most of it. I offered it as a sop to Skeel, but he was afraid to accept it; and finally I decided to rid myself of it. I wrapped it in one of the club newspapers and threw it in a wastebin near the Flatiron Building.”

  “You wrapped it in the morning Herald,” put in Heath. “Did you know that Pop Cleaver reads nothing but the Herald?”

  “Sergeant!” Vance’s voice was a cutting reprimand. “Certainly Mr. Spotswoode was not aware of that fact—else he would not have selected the Herald.”

  Spotswoode smiled at Heath with pitying contempt. Then, with an appreciative glance at Vance, he turned back to Markham.

  “An hour or so after I had disposed of the jewels, I was assailed by the fear that the package might be found and the paper traced. So I bought another Herald and put it on the rack.” He paused. “Is that all?”

  Markham nodded.

  “Thank you—that’s all; except that I must now ask you to go with these officers.”

  “In that case,” said Spotswoode quietly, “there’s a small favor I have to ask of you, Mr. Markham. Now that the blow has fallen, I wish to write a certain note—to my wife. But I want to be alone when I write it. Surely you understand that desire. It will take but a few moments. Your men may stand at the door—I can’t very well escape.… The victor can afford to be generous to that extent.”

  Before Markham had time to reply, Vance stepped forward and touched his arm.

  “I trust,” he interposed, “that you won’t deem it necess’ry to refuse Mr. Spotswoode’s request.”

  Markham looked at him hesitantly.

  “I guess you’ve pretty well earned the right to dictate, Vance,” he acquiesced.

  Then he ordered Heath and Snitkin to wait outside in the hall, and he and Vance and I went into the adjoining room. Markham stood, as if on guard, near the door; but Vance, with an ironical smile, sauntered to the window and gazed out into Madison Square.

  “My word, Markham!” he declared. “There’s something rather colossal about that chap. Y’ know, one can’t help admiring him. He’s so eminently sane and logical.”

  Markham made no response. The drone of the city’s midafternoon noises, muffled by the closed windows, seemed to intensify the ominous silence of the little bedchamber where we waited.

  Then came a sharp report from the other room.

  Markham flung open the door. Heath and Snitkin were already rushing toward Spotswoode’s prostrate body, and were bending over it when Markham entered. Immediately he wheeled about and glared at Vance, who now appeared in the doorway.

  “He’s shot himself!”

  “Fancy that,” said Vance.

  “You—you knew he was going to do that?” Markham spluttered.

  “It was rather obvious, don’t y’ know.”

  Markham’s eyes flashed angrily.

  “And you deliberately interceded for him—to give him the opportunity?”

  “Tut, tut, my dear fellow!” Vance reproached him. “Pray don’t give way to conventional moral indignation. However unethical—theoretically—it may be to take another’s life, a man’s own life is certainly his to do with as he chooses. Suicide is his inalienable right. And under the paternal tyranny of our modern democracy, I’m rather inclined to think it’s about the only right he has left, what?”

  He glanced at his watch and frowned.

  “D’ ye know, I’ve missed my concert, bothering with your beastly affairs,” he complained amiably, giving Markham an engaging smile; “and now you’re actually scolding me. ’Pon my word, old fellow, you’re deuced ungrateful!”

  36 The treatise referred to by Vance was Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik.

  37 Recently I ran across an article by Doctor George A. Dorsey, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and author of “Why We Behave Like Human Beings,” which bore intimate testimony to the scientific accuracy of Vance’s theory. In it Doctor Dorsey said: “Poker is a cross-section of life. The way a man behaves in a poker game is the way he behaves in life.… His success or failure lies in the way his physical organism responds to the stimuli supplied by the game.… I have studied humanity all my life from the anthropologic and psychological viewpoint. And I have yet to find a better laboratory exercise than to observe the manners of men as they see my raise and come back at me.… The psychologist’s verbalized, visceral, and manual behaviors are functioning at their highest in a poker game.… I can truthfully say that I learned about men from poker.”

  THE GREENE MURDER CASE (Part 1)

  CHAPTER I

  A DOUBLE TRAGEDY

  (Tuesday, November 9; 10 A.M.)

  IT has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers—men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton—have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times—a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. And yet I realize, as I read over my own voluminous notes on the case, and inspect the various documents relating to it, how little of its inner history ever came to light, and how impossible it would be for even the most imaginative chronicler to fill in the hiatuses.

  The world, of course, knows the external facts. For over a month the Press of two continents was filled with accounts of this appalling tragedy; and even the bare outline was sufficient to gratify the public’s craving for the abnormal and the spectacular. But the inside story of the catastrophe surpassed even the wildest flights of public fancy; and, as I now sit down to divulge those facts for the first time, I am oppressed with a feeling akin to unreality, although I was a witness to most of them and hold in my possession the incontestable records of their actuality.

  Of the fiendish ingenuity which lay behind this terrible crime, of the warped psychological motives that inspired it, and of the strange hidden sources of its technique, the world is completely ignorant. Moreover, no explanation has ever been given of the analytic steps that led to its solution. Nor have the events attending the mechanism of that solution— events in themselves highly dramatic and unusual—ever been recounted. The public believes that the termination of the case was a result of the usual police methods of investigation; but this is because the public is unaware of many of the vital factors of the crime itself, and because both the Police Department and the District Attorney’s office have, as if by tacit agreement, refused to make known the entire truth—whether for fear of being disbelieved or merely because there are certain things so terrible that no man wishes to talk of them, I do not know.

  The record, therefore, which I am about to set down is the first complete and unedited history of the Greene holocaust.38 I feel that now the truth should be known, for it is history, and one should not shrink from historical facts. Also, I believe that the credit for the solution of this case should go where it belongs.

  The man who elucidated the mystery and brought to a close that palimpsest of horror was, curiously enough, in no way officially connected with the police; and in all the published accounts of the murder his name was not once mentioned. And yet, had it not been for him and his novel methods of criminal deduction, the heinous plo
t against the Greene family would have been conclusively successful. The police in their researches were dealing dogmatically with the evidential appearances of the crime, whereas the operations of the criminal were being conducted on a plane quite beyond the comprehension of the ordinary investigator.

  This man who, after weeks of sedulous and disheartening analysis, eventually ferreted out the source of the horror, was a young social aristocrat, an intimate friend of John F.-X. Markham, the District Attorney. His name I am not at liberty to divulge, but for the purposes of these chronicles I have chosen to call him Philo Vance. He is no longer in this country, having transferred his residence several years ago to a villa outside Florence; and, since he has no intention of returning to America, he has acceded to my request to publish the history of the criminal cases in which he participated as a sort of amicus curiae. Markham also has retired to private life; and Sergeant Ernest Heath, that doughty and honest officer of the Homicide Bureau who officially handled the Greene case for the Police Department, has, through an unexpected legacy, been able to gratify his life’s ambition to breed fancy Wyandottes on a model farm in the Mohawk Valley. Thus circumstances have made it possible for me to publish my intimate records of the Greene tragedy.

  A few words are necessary to explain my own participation in the case. (I say “participation,” though, in reality, my role was that of passive spectator.) For several years I had been Vance’s personal attorney. I had resigned from my father’s law firm—Van Dine, Davis & Van Dine—in order to devote myself exclusively to Vance’s legal and financial needs, which, by the way, were not many. Vance and I had been friends from our undergraduate days at Harvard, and I found in my new duties as his legal agent and monetary steward a sinecure combined with many social and cultural compensations.

  Vance at that time was thirty-four years old. He was just under six feet, slender, sinewy, and graceful. His chiselled regular features gave his face the attraction of strength and uniform modelling, but a sardonic coldness of expression precluded the designation of handsome. He had aloof grey eyes, a straight, slender nose, and a mouth suggesting both cruelty and asceticism. But, despite the severity of his lineaments— which acted like an impenetrable glass wall between him and his fellows— he was highly sensitive and mobile; and, though his manner was somewhat detached and supercilious, he exerted an undeniable fascination over those who knew him at all well.

  Much of his education had been acquired in Europe, and he still retained a slight Oxonian accent and intonation, though I happen to be aware that this was no affectation: he cared too little for the opinions of others to trouble about maintaining any pose. He was an indefatigable student. His mind was ever eager for knowledge, and he devoted much of his time to the study of ethnology and psychology. His greatest intellectual enthusiasm was art, and he fortunately had an income sufficient to indulge his passion for collecting. It was, however, his interest in psychology and his application of it to individual behaviourism that first turned his attention to the criminal problems which came under Markham’s jurisdiction.

  The first case in which he participated was, as I have recorded elsewhere, the murder of Alvin Benson.39 The second was the seemingly insoluble strangling of the famous Broadway beauty, Margaret Odell.40 And in the late fall of the same year came the Greene tragedy. As in the two former cases, I kept a complete record of this new investigation. I possessed myself of every available document, making verbatim copies of those claimed for the police archives, and even jotted down the numerous conversations that took place in and out of conference between Vance and the official investigators. And, in addition, I kept a diary which, for elaborateness and completeness, would have been the despair of Samuel Pepys.

  The Greene murder case occurred toward the end of Markham’s first year in office. As you may remember, the winter came very early that season. There were two severe blizzards in November, and the amount of snow-fall for that month broke all local records for eighteen years. I mention this fact of the early snows because it played a sinister part in the Greene affair: it was, indeed, one of the vital factors of the murderer’s scheme. No one has yet understood, or even sensed, the connection between the unseasonable weather of that late fall and the fatal tragedy that fell upon the Greene household; but that is because all of the dark secrets of the case were not made known.

  Vance was projected into the Benson murder as the result of a direct challenge from Markham; and his activities in the Canary case were due to his own expressed desire to lend a hand. But pure coincidence was responsible for his participation in the Greene investigation. During the two months that had elapsed since his solution of the Canary’s death Markham had called upon him several times regarding moot points of criminal detection in connection with the routine work of the District Attorney’s office; and it was during an informal discussion of one of these problems that the Greene case was first mentioned.

  Markham and Vance had long been friends. Though dissimilar in tastes and even in ethical outlook, they nevertheless respected each other profoundly. I have often marvelled at the friendship of these two antipodal men; but as the years went by I came more and more to understand it. It was as if they were drawn together by those very qualities which each realized—perhaps with a certain repressed regret— were lacking in his own nature. Markham was forthright, brusque, and, on occasion, domineering, taking life with grim and serious concern, and following the dictates of his legal conscience in the face of every obstacle: honest, incorruptible, and untiring. Vance, on the other hand, was volatile, debonair, and possessed of a perpetual Juvenalian cynicism, smiling ironically at the bitterest realities, and consistently fulfilling the role of a whimsically disinterested spectator of life. But, withal, he understood people as profoundly as he understood art, and his dissection of motives and his shrewd readings of character were—as I had many occasions to witness—uncannily accurate. Markham apprehended these qualities in Vance, and sensed their true value.

  It was not yet ten o’clock of the morning of November the 9th when Vance and I, after motoring to the old Criminal Courts Building on the corner of Franklin and Centre Streets, went directly to the District Attorney’s office on the fourth floor. On that momentous forenoon two gangsters, each accusing the other of firing the fatal shot in a recent pay-roll hold-up, were to be cross-examined by Markham; and this interview was to decide the question as to which of the men would be charged with murder and which held as a State’s witness. Markham and Vance had discussed the situation the night before in the lounge-room of the Stuyvesant Club, and Vance had expressed a desire to be present at the examination. Markham had readily assented, and so we had risen early and driven downtown.

  The interview with the two men lasted for an hour, and Vance’s disconcerting opinion was that neither was guilty of the actual shooting.

  “Y’ know, Markham,” he drawled, when the sheriff had returned the prisoners to the Tombs, “those two Jack Sheppards are quite sincere: each one thinks he’s telling the truth. Ergo, neither of ’em fired the shot. A distressin’ predicament. They’re obvious gallows-birds—born for the gibbet; and it’s a beastly shame not to be able to round out their destinies in proper fashion… I say, wasn’t there another participant in the hold-up?”

  Markham nodded. “A third got away. According to these two, it was a well- known gangster named Eddie Maleppo.”

  “Then Eduardo is your man.”41

  Markham did not reply, and Vance rose lazily and reached for his ulster.

  “By the by,” he said, slipping into his coat, “I note that our upliftin’ Press bedecked its front pages this morning with head-lines about a pogrom at the old Greene mansion last night. Wherefore?”

  Markham glanced quickly at the clock on the wall, and frowned.

  “That reminds me. Chester Greene called up the first thing this morning and insisted on seeing me. I told him eleven o’clock.”

  “Where do you fit in?” Vance had taken his hand from the
door-knob, and drew out his cigarette-case.

  “I don’t!” snapped Markham. “But people think the District Attorney’s office is a kind of clearing-house for all their troubles. It happens, however, that I’ve known Chester Greene a long time—we’re both members of the Marylebone Golf Club—and so I must listen to his plaint about what was obviously an attempt to annex the famous Greene plate.”

  “Burglary—eh, what?” Vance took a few puffs on his cigarette. “With two women shot?”

  “Oh, it was a miserable business! An amateur, no doubt. Got in a panic, shot up the place, and bolted.”

  “Seems a dashed curious proceeding.” Vance abstractedly reseated himself in a large arm-chair near the door. “Did the antique cutlery actually disappear?”

  “Nothing was taken. The thief was evidently frightened off before he made his haul.”

  “Sounds a bit thick, don’t y’ know.—An amateur thief breaks into a prominent home, casts a predat’ry eye on the dining-room silver, takes alarm, goes upstairs and shoots two women in their respective boudoirs, and then flees… Very touchin’ and all that, but unconvincin’. Whence came this caressin’ theory?”

  Markham was glowering, but when he spoke it was with an effort at restraint.

  “Feathergill was on duty last night when the call was relayed from Head- quarters, and accompanied the police to the house. He agrees with their conclusions.” (Amos Feathergill was then an Assistant District Attorney. He later ran on the Tammany ticket for assemblyman, and was elected.)

  “Nevertheless, I could bear to know why Chester Greene is desirous of having polite converse with you.”

  Markham compressed his lips. He was not in cordial mood that morning, and Vance’s flippant curiosity irked him. After a moment, however, he said grudgingly:

  “Since the attempted robbery interests you so keenly, you may, if you insist, wait and hear what Greene has to say.”

  “I’ll stay,” smiled Vance, removing his coat. “I’m weak; just can’t resist a passionate entreaty… Which one of the Greenes is Chester? And how is he related to the two deceased?